Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday April 22, 2012 @11:37PM
from the quick-someone-write-a-treacly-pop-song dept.

It's not just the TRS-80; new submitter sebt writes "ZX Spectrum, the microcomputer launched in 1982 by Sinclair Research (Cambridge, UK) turns 30 today. The launch of the machine is seen by many today as the inspiration for a generation of eager young programmers, software and game designers in the UK. The events surrounding its launch, notably Sinclair's well-known rivalry with Acorn, later helped to inspire the design of the ARM architecture and most recently the Raspberry PI (based on ARM), in an effort to reboot the idea of enthusiastic kid programmers first captured by the Spectrum and Acorn's BBC micro. Happy birthday Spec!"

... was a Timex Sinclair 1000. It had 16k of RAM and loaded programs on audio cassettes! You had to be pretty consistent with the volume or you'd "lose" programs. I programmed Monopoly into it, complete with color-pixel graphics, all in BASIC!

My 2nd computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000. absolutely hated it compared to my first computer (a Vic-20) because you couldn't just *type* your program, every key was a shortcut for a basic command, drove me up the wall:)

Mine was the Australian equivalent, the MicroBee. They were another Z80 variant, very solidly built. The biggest draw for most of us was that the non-disk based versions had battery-backed CMOS RAM. They also had a Word Processor and other software on EPROM. I saw several Sinclair 1000s, in those days but never liked them, I think I would have gone crazy from frustration if I'd had to use one. Interestingly enough, they've started to make the MicroBees again... http://www.microbeetechnology.com.au/index.htm [microbeete...ogy.com.au].

Personally I think the keycodes was kind of elegant. It meant less syntax errors, simplified parsing and meant the program occupied less space in memory. The ZX Spectrum inherited the feature from the ZX81 and ZX80.

Later ZX Spectrums from the the Spectrum 128 onwards actually allowed you to type programs manually but only in 128K mode. If you booted into 48K mode the ROM still enforced the old style. The first Spectrum 128 printed all the keycodes onto the buttons but the +2 and +3 only printed a couplemaking it enormous fun trying to figure out which button meant what. Most Spectrum owners can probably still recall the sequences for calling LOAD "", POKE and cursor keys with little trouble.

Unlikely. Back then, every BASIC interpreter (certainly all of those for 8-bit home computers) used to "tokenize" commands to save costly RAM (and CPU cycles on interpretation, too). Tokenization usually meant translating every command to a 1-byte index to a lookup table. That's what is called "bytecode" nowadays.

A tokenizer wouldn't need a few hundred bytes. In those days we coded algorithms like that very efficiently. A few tens of bytes perhaps.

The biggest part of it would be the look up table for the keywords. But that would be needed for output of the listing regardless.

As a point of comparison, the Acorn Atom had a BASIC with a tokenizer, and it's ROM was 8KB versus the Spectrum's 16KB ROM. To be fair though the spectrum was probably just doing it that way for consistency with ZX80 & ZX81. The ZX80 only ha

Actually if you look into the BASIC interpreters of the time, I can't think of a single one that actually stored entire keywords in memory. They used codes for keywords and variables, such that most keywords were encoded as a single byte.

The Sinclair just made it possible to TYPE those codes explicitly instead of having to spell out the words and let the interpreter do the primitive compression.

In particular, I'm thinking of Commodore's implementation and the TRS-80.

What are you talking about with Vistual Basic?? The GP is correct. Most BASIC implementations from that timeframe were developed and licensed from Microsoft. Boot up a Commodore 128 and it even shows the MS copyright. In fact, there's a humourous story about Commodore/Jack Tramiel getting Microsoft Basic without any per-computer licensing fees, and as such being the only person who ever outmaneuvered Bill Gates in a business deal.

Personally I think the keycodes was kind of elegant. It meant less syntax errors, simplified parsing and meant the program occupied less space in memory.

What I really liked about it is that all BASIC programming commands are available on the machine itself; so I just kept wondering what PUT# and GET# commands would do, as the manual for the Brazilian TK-90X won't give details and we never got the microdrive here.

And I think it was kind of cool to have that keyboard with so many stuff written in it, for me as a kid.

It probably was possible to tokenise but then you need to add more code to do the tokenizing and handling of syntax errors. I assume Sinclair just stuck with what they had from the ZX81 because it worked well. Generally speaking once you got used to it it was an easy system to work with. On the flip side if you use a ZX Spectrum emulator these days it's almost impossible without a keyboard overlay to tell you what buttons do what.

I had a Sinclair ZX80 as a kid. My father fixed the keyboard issue for me with a real keyboard connected to it. The way it was set up, I could type BASIC commands normally, which was much nicer than the typical method. The standard peripherals were still a black and white TV and cassette deck; I'll always remember the lovely sound of a program loading from tape.

I had a Sinclair ZX80 as a kid. My father fixed the keyboard issue for me with a real keyboard connected to it. The way it was set up, I could type BASIC commands normally, which was much nicer than the typical method. The standard peripherals were still a black and white TV and cassette deck; I'll always remember the lovely sound of a program loading from tape.

I still have my Sinclair Spectrum ZX 48K, complete with joystick and other peripreals. My most enduring memory is not the sound of a program loading from tape it's the "Crrrcccswwwhhzzzzz" sound my cheapass cassette players occasionally made when they ate up my tapes and with them my precious programs. With time I became an expert in cassette player repair. Thankfully those days are over.

Programming with tape machines was the real exercise in patience. Kids these days don't know how easy they have it with source files saved in a moment, automatically before each compile. It took us 5 minutes to save to tape. And we had to keep track of what version of what program we stored where on what tape.

If we didn't save before running we risked a crash and losing everything we'd added since the last save. Knowing when to take the risk and when it was time to save was the only way of making progress.

Programming with tape machines was the real exercise in patience. Kids these days don't know how easy they have it with source files saved in a moment, automatically before each compile. It took us 5 minutes to save to tape. And we had to keep track of what version of what program we stored where on what tape.

Yes, that and discovering that you had run out of batteries. Most cassette players back then did not come with an external power supply. Eventually I saved up for a powersupply with a user selectable voltage output.

My first computer was a Spectrum. Not having been exposed to other machines before, the one-keystroke-per-command feature felt perfectly natural to me, and faster than having to type the commands by hand (in part because the rubber keyboard hindered fast typing).

It also made it easier to formulate correct programs: the system knew that certain keywords should only appear at the start of a line and made it impossible to put that keyword anywhere else in the line. An early form of syntax checking.

It made Spectrum Basic readable; it ensured that the commands and keywords were always written in full, rather than the shorthand that crept up everywhere else.

It had its drawbacks: hunting down infrequently-used commands could take more time than typing them, and the system was unique to Sinclair so the skill didn't transfer.

Ah, the Speccy. I still have mine, plus a box full of tapes. I wonder if they're still readable though.

But you have to admit its nice to see the little guys that meant so much to so many actually get recognized. I remember how in the late 90s-early 00s all you would ever hear about on computing history was MSFT and Apple, maybe a little IBM. But many of us didn't have IBM or Mac money when we were kids so its nice to see Sinclair, Commodore, Tandy, Atari, BBC Micro, all the little guys that started so many of us down the road to a lifetime of computing.

So while i never got to own a Sinclair (Like you I had a VIC) I'm sure that those that had the Sinclair enjoyed much time with it and love computers to this day thanks to it. So happy BDay Sinclair, here's to you and all the little guys that started us on the road of computing.

As I said with the TRS while I'd love to be a teen again frankly i wouldn't trade our childhood for the teens of today with all these locked down cell phones and tablets, the teens of today I doubt will get a love of tinkering and tweaking that we got from our little guys.

My first computer was a spectrum too. I recently I downloaded the excellent open source FUSE [sourceforge.net] emulator which when combined with.TAP format games from World of Spectrum [worldofspectrum.org] and the right settings, you can watch the tape loading screens.

For the "R Tape loading error" gambler in you, some emulators even let you connect a cassette player to your audio interface's line in for that authentic experience.

I had the Timex Sinclair 1000 as well, but not 16KB module. Paid $60 for it at Hills--I was in 6th grade. It learned quickly to be careful with my precious 2k of RAM, but I coded a fairly accurate image of the Space Shuttle and figured out how to make it "fly" across the screen. Hard to believe I have been writing code for almost 30 years!

The TS1000 was my first computer, too. I certainly had a love/hate relationship with that machine. I hated that it was so incredibly limited, but loved that it was mine. I didn't have to sign up for programming time anymore at the school or library. The machine was all my own whenever I wanted it even if it sucked. It was cheap and it was mine! Mine, mine, mine!! It was at least a good learning machine. There were a surprising number of programming books available, and even a decent amount of off the shelf software. The TS1000/ZX81 was certainly a brilliant example of engineering efficiency. Although it wouldn't compare to Woz's work with the Apple II, the fact that the Sinclair was able to do everything with only 4 chips was an incredible achievement.

I always had a soft spot in my heart for Sinclair and his machines. I wish they had something like the Spectrum here in the states, but by then Commodore had initiated the price wars and it was pointless for Clive to invest in his newer machines here. I can see why they were so popular in England. They were inexpensive, easy to work with, and quite ubiquitous. While many Americans long for their Commodore 64's or Atari 800's, the Sinclair was a truly British machine made for Britons. It's understandable why that generation of users holds the Speccy near and dear to their hearts. Software is still being produced for the Spectrum, and it boasts the largest software library in the world (according to Wikipedia).

In many ways Clive Sinclair was both the Jack Tramiel and Steve Jobs of Europe. Like Jobs, he believed in simple elegance for all his products. He was also a ruthless leader. Unlike Jobs, though, and more like Tramiel, he also believed in making his products as inexpensively as possible... cutting corners wherever he could to bring prices down. He certainly should be considered one of the great computing pioneers and given the same due reverence of his American peers. After all, he was knighted for bringing computing power to the masses.

Nevertheless, I don't think I'd use my TS1000 to control a nuclear power plant, as Sinclair Research suggested in their advertisements. Unfortunately, my unit isn't going to be running power plants or anything else for that matter--it doesn't work at all anymore. The years of temperature changes in the attic on the cheap parts finally did that little wonder in. I still have it sitting prominently at my desk, though. It makes a great conversation piece.

I don't think I'd use my TS1000 to control a nuclear power plant, as Sinclair Research suggested in their advertisements.

When I was at school we went on a tour of what is now called Atomic Energy Research Establishment [wikipedia.org] at Harwell. We had a tour around one of their fission reactors and there in the control room was a Commodore PET. This would have been in about 1983 or 84.

I wonder if the "old" generation of microcomputers - the TRS80, the Sinclair, Commodore 64, Apple II - were more inspirational to young programmers and coders than what we have today. The old computers were all command line. You *had* to know what you were doing to make the thing do anything! You couldn't break it because you had to know how the thing worked to make it do anything! And there was a joy or satisfaction of "Hey, I made this machine do 'this', exactly how I wanted it to do it!" Today's PCs/Macs/pads? Anyone can pick one up, use it, maybe even cause a lot of damage with it but never understand the inner workings of it because all you had to do to make it go is click on some icon somewhere. There is no command line to use (at least that most users would choose to work with). You can become a proficient user of it but without some real digging you will have a hard time writing any kind of usable software for yourself, even as rudimentary as a "Hello, world".

I liken it to giving a car to a starting driver. The Sinclair and other older microcomputers were like giving a kid a 20-yr old Honda Civic with a manual transmission. Slow, dependable, bland, hard to get in trouble with it, you have to know how to drive it to make it go, you can really get a feel for how the thing wants to drive. The newer, much more powerful computers of today could be like giving that same kid a Porsche - powerful, fast, stylish, easy to get in trouble with, easy to wreck at high speeds, you may never understand its inner-workings because they are too much to learn.

- they left something for the owners to do, today you can get ready made software for almost every need- when you turned those computers you were in the programming interface, so that was in the focus and people would give a try to use it- Personal computers were the magic new things of that decade, people were still appreciating it. Nowadays a PC with 16G of RAM and a quad core CPU is "just another" computer and more of a commodity than magic- We loved to build things (like small electronic circuits, small programs) ourselves. Nowadays consumerism has taken everywhere. We just need to pay and buy.

- they left something for the owners to do, today you can get ready made software for almost every need, where as then if you needed a simple fucking 4 function calculator you needed to learn programming

- when you turned those computers you were in the programming interface, and with no software you had no other choice

- Personal computers were the magic new things of that decade, people were still cursing it. Nowadays a PC with 16G of RAM and a quad core CPU is "just another" computer and more of a commodity than some bullshit you needed a PHD to operate

- Only a certain segment of nerds loved to build things (like small electronic circuits, small programs) ourselves. Nowadays consumerism has taken everywhere. We just need to pay and buy for them to encroach on our elitism

Listen, I grew up with this batch of 30 year old computers, I love them, and I was inspired by them, but they were not magical boxes of imignation, they were devel boxes of fustration that took damn near 30 years for average people to be fully functional with. And frankly all the knowledge I gained as a child gave me fuck all nothing with modern computers, so what I can pull the zeropage address of a Apple II out of the top of my head, doesn't do me any good past 1990, neither does the programming techniques or basic operations, these computers may have inspired a generation of hard core nerds, but outside of that they had little or nothing in common with modern machines. ASM wont do a kid much good if they cant even make a spreadsheet now.

I disagree. Fundamentals are ALWAYS important even if they aren't practical. While 6502 assembly isn't practical anymore, the experience you gained programming with it provided you a foundation for future skills that many of your peers might not have. That not only gives you a competitive advantage, it makes you into a better, smarter professional. You can play the piano without learning music theory, but you will be a much better pianist if you do take the time to learn the fundamentals of music. It's the same for computer science or information technology.

+1I started out on a Spektrum, going to the department store almost every day, programming on the one they had on display for advertisement (they also had the ZX81, but with it being monochrome, awful keyboard and only 1K of RAM, who wanted that?). My friend would even bring his cassette player so we could save programs we wrote... (cassette player as in "bulky, heavy, need a bag to carry it around").After a while, my parents got fed up with my hanging around in the store constantly, so they decided to buy me one - while we were waiting for the clerk to get one from storage, we talked to some boy who convinced us to get a C64, as it had more RAM, more power, better keyboard,... so we got that instead...Of course I was disappointed with the missing gfx commands on the 64, but quickly got around that (in part because of "Simon's Basic" IIRC), and ended up with the good ol' 6502/6510 Assembler programming... heck, once you get around with 3 not-so-all-purpose registers and the limited ASM commands, you ought to be able to program in just about any language with a couple pages of syntax/command reference... seeing how "well" kids nowadays are tought in business school as far as programming goes, I always wonder if we should put an emulator (or maybe even the "real thing"?) on their desk and let them learn coding in assembler for a while... sure programming is easy with all the fancy tools and libraries, but if you never really learned the basics, how should they know that requiring a bigger, faster computer isn't the way you fix limitations and performance problems?

There is a big shortage of people who know what a zeropage is now. I happen to work in Embedded software development and that sort of knowledge is vital (not the exact address, but the concept). It is hard to recruit people like me because we are few and far between.

Nope. Everyone I know that had one, at least bought papers where you could input cheat POKEs for infinite lives, times etc. Anecdote, I know - but still, where did you get your statistics of 'Most Spectrum owners' from?

I still say, give me a room full of Apple II's (preferable//e or IIgs) and eager students, and I'll give you room full of great developers. There is value in understanding how software interacts with hardware, something which has been missing in most programmers for a long time. That's not a new complaint, it existed in the mainframe and mini computer world before the microcomputer revolution. The pioneers of the micro revolution, the early adopters, etc broke that mold. But as operating systems and development environments have become more "friendly", much of that has fallen away.

I liken it to giving a car to a starting driver. The Sinclair and other older microcomputers were like giving a kid a 20-yr old Honda Civic with a manual transmission. Slow, dependable, bland, hard to get in trouble with it, you have to know how to drive it to make it go, you can really get a feel for how the thing wants to drive. The newer, much more powerful computers of today could be like giving that same kid a Porsche - powerful, fast, stylish, easy to get in trouble with, easy to wreck at high speeds, you may never understand its inner-workings because they are too much to learn.

Most "wide of the mark" analogy ever...?

Owning a civic doesn't require lifting the hood and tinkering with the engine.

Yes I think they were inspirational. I remember wanting to write a screen scrolling type Defender game on my Spectrum and learning Z80 machine code in order to do it. I couldn't afford an assembler though so I had to write out the programs in pseudo-code and manually look up their codes. It didn't seem a big deal at the time but it was immensely satisfying to actually produce a working program from a series of 8-bit numbers.
I'm hoping the Raspberry Pi will do a similar job of stimulating young programming talent today.

I agree the computers were very inspirational - my first computer was a ZX-81.

But kids today are NOT suffering because the computers we have now are "too powerful"!!!?

Instead it is an AMAZING time to be growing up. I know a few ten year olds selling apps on the App Store!!! How is that not even more awesome and impressive than my writing a crossword puzzle generator at the same age?

The car analogy really falls down because there is no danger for younger kids with greater computing power and reach, just a

I know a few ten year olds selling apps on the App Store!!! How is that not even more awesome and impressive than my writing a crossword puzzle generator at the same age?

But there were children selling apps back then too. Only they were doing the full business, accepting mail-order cheques, duplicating to cassette tapes, making the labels and instructions, and mailing them out.

I'd say that a far greater proportion of the developers were school children then than now.

Not as many though. And they were doing the parts of the thing that were NOT programming, that while educational took time away from deep learning of programming.

They programmed them first, then distributed them.

"I'd say that a far greater proportion of the developers were school children then than now."I'd say totally the opposite. There are way more younger developers now than there were back in the day; if for no other reason than because LOTS more households have computers now.

Note the word "proportion" in what I said. That means it doesn't matter that more households have computers now.

One of my two is in my parent's loft. Working Commodore +4, and Commodore 64. And a 1541 and MPS-801 to go with them. There's also a boxed up (tower-modded) Amiga 1200 with '040 expansion card there too. Unfortunately that loft is in the UK and I'm in Canada.

I have my first ZX81 still, and I picked up another Spectrum a few years ago out of nostalgia. ZX Printer, microdrives, interface one... a whole list of bits and pieces. I have a ton of nostalgia for my teen years in the 80s', and I can't help but smile when I crack open my copies of Crash magazine.

What always strikes me as funny is how "local" computing was in those days. There are entire countries were people never heard of computer brand X or model Y because they used brand W and model V. Commodore, Amiga, Sinclair, Apple and god knows what else. The Sinclair I seem to reclass was available in Holland but it was the commodore that got used. The BBC even had their own computer! Imagine that, that would be MS-NBC getting into the OS market, you just would not think that was at all likely would you?

As the Warsaw Pact was crumbling and the people of the Soviet Union were exposed to Western influences, there was a surge of interest in DIY home computing. I think the availability of a local Z80 clone, as well as use of off-the-shelf consumer technology such as cassette tape and analog TV output, was what made Spectrum a popular choice for clone designs. One of those was my first home computer.

My Speccy was the gateway to a life of IT (I ended up becoming a software engineer, and part-owner of a startup). Will always feel grateful to the designers of the 8-bit micros that started all this...

Oh, and I still remember my first hack - dissassembling JetPac and finding the POKE that gave me infinite lives. Now *that* was fun:-)

Ohh, I was lazier than that:) Montezuma Revenge on PC was coded in such a way, that when you searched for the byte with default number of lives (IIRC 3), it was before the 5th match that you'd hit the right byte to patch in the executable. No disassembly was involved. I'd patch the copy, run it, it'd crash or have a glitch, copy again, patch next location, and in IIRC 10 minutes I had 127 lives; IIRC the most significant bit couldn't be set. The key was not to get greedy: I initially tried incrementing the count only by one. Had I tried going directly to 255, I'd have never succeeded. I still remember it, even though it was 25+ years ago...

Increased number of lives requires tweaking that initial value, yes, but for infinite lives, you'd want to find the bit of code that loaded that value's address, and then loaded that initial value, and then stored it somewhere else. Then you'd want the bit of code that loaded that stored value's address, then loaded the stored value, then decremented it, and jumped if it had reached zero.Then NOP the decrement, the test or the jump.

Yeah, that's about right. Loading screen looked *awesome*, then you got to the game (assuming you could avoid the dreaded 'R Tape Loading Error' )and you realised exactly where all the Â£1.99 that the tape had cost you went...

And yet, we never learned. The very next week, it was back to WHSmiths with your pocket money for *another* Â£1.99 game from Mastertronic, hoping against hope to avoid the inevitable disappointment...

A few of us make hardware for the humble Speccy still, you can now go on the Internet with the Spectranet http://spectrum.alioth.net/doc [alioth.net] - at the VCF in 2010, much fun was had sending tweets from a Sinclair Spectrum, you can connect hard drives/CF cards with the DivIDE http://baze.au.com/divide/ [au.com], there's a USB interface (although the developer seems to have disappeared, hmm...) and various other fun bits of hardware to play with. Retro enthusasts are still writing some really nice games for the Spectrum and there's a strong demoscene, too.

The ULA (the custom logic IC) has also been reverse engineered by actually de-encapsulating the chip and photographing it with a microscope http://www.zxdesign.info/ [zxdesign.info] - you can buy the book there, by the way... There were some interesting anecdotes from that. Today we have FPGAs and CPLDs and you can essentially make custom logic at home, but back in the early 1980s, companies like Ferranti made generic dies, and stored them, and you made your actual custom logic by specifying the interconnection layer. Richard Altwasser had only 6 weeks to design the circuit for the Spectrum's ULA (which handles video and all other I/O for the basic machine). When Ferranti completed the first wafer of Spectrum ULAs, they ran tests and found that they didn't work. It turns out that a Ferranti engineer had made a mistake when making the phototools to make the metallization layer, and basically half the chip lacked its clock signal. However, one single die on the whole wafer DID work. It turns out that despite all this being done in a clean room, a spec of dust had landed in precisely the right place on the phototools to connect the clock circuit, so they had one working ULA die on the wafer, and Sinclair could test and validate their ULA.

Incidentally if you're in London on the 5th/6th May, there's a 30th anniversary of the Spectrum celebration at the British Film Institute. It's free to enter. Details are here:http://www.imperica.com/horizons [imperica.com]

You haven't really lived until you have experienced flight simulator on the Timex Sinclair.
I had the full meal deal. Extra ram kit as well as the thermal printer. I was in hog heaven
when I upgraded to the Timex Sinclair 2000 (color and sound!!).
Enjoy.

Ah, I remember. Atic Atac. Moon Buggy. The Hobbit. All great games. But of course the coolest thing was to program that sucker. I always liked the Basic dialect better than Commodore's (which was far more popular in my school), and even liked the weird tokenized entry method. But the real game changer for me was when I bought (yes, bought!) a Pascal and a Forth compiler. Man, Forth rocked. It still is one of my favorite programming languages.

Funny enough, my father was really opposed to me getting one, so an (older) friend of mine had to buy one for me and "lend" it to me until my father finally gave up and let me outright own it. A Ph.D. in EE later I'd say it was a good investment...

Too bad at some point my brother ended up with it and rather than giving it back for proper conservation he discarded it. I miss it dearly.

in the UK probably used the Spectrums rival, the BBC Micro, as it had expansion ports, extension ROMs etc, it was used as the standard computing workhorse for both hobbyists and electronics labs around the country.

But there was really no comparison. The BBC had a proper keyboard and tons of connectors on the back/underneath. Not just connections for printers, serial ports and floppy disks either, it was the Arduino of its day.

The only real problem was the graphics eating up two thirds of the RAM.

The BBC model B cost a lot of money, far more than the C64 or ZX Spectrum. If people used the BBC it was most likely in schools where it enjoyed far more popularity than it did in the home. When Acorn finally released an affordable home computer called the Electron it was so gimped that it didn't really hold much attraction for anybody.

The BBC micro was the 'standard' educational model, not least because of the BBC brand and the association with the Beeb's educational TV programs. The home market was dominated by Spectrums and C64s.

After spending the summer playing with my friends' ZX81, I got a Spectrum for christmas at the age of 8, and every week I would pester my dad to buy me "Your Spectrum" and "Your Sinclair" magazines, with their pages upon pages of type-em-in program listings. I'd then piss off my sister by monopolising the TV for 3hrs while I typed in the latest greatest amazing game.... and spend 5 minutes playing the inevitable top-down scrolling dodge-em-up before thinking "surely I could do better than that!". So I set out to try.

30 years later, I'm making a good living as a senior programmer, and I put it all down to those early days of truly accessible computing. The Spectrum was the ideal balance between entertainment machine and experimentation platform, amazing a geeky 8yr old with its possibilities while its limitations positively encouraged anyone with the right mindset to try and work around them. Hacking infinite lives with PEEK and POKE... designing game graphics pixel by pixel and then converting them to integer data... figuring out how to give the illusion of full-colour graphics when you only had one foreground and one background colour per 8x8 character square... i learned so much about computing from those days. Thanks Sinclair, you were awesome.

Uridium was mono in the play area because attribute clash was especially visible in a sideways scroller. Most games which had scrolling were mono. It tended to be games with static top down or isometric layouts which would put more colour in and ensure that sprites were multiples of characters to minimize clash. e.g. Sabre Wulf, Jet Set Willy etc.

I don't recall any game explicitly mixing colours to make more than two though perhaps some did use dithering a bit. IMO the game that managed to exploit the Spe

Better graphics modes too. Colour addressable per pixel in various resolutions, plus a teletext mode that only used 1KB. And commands in the BASIC interpreter to draw on that screen too.

Unfortunately, the awesome graphics modes used so much memory that you had no space left for your program. Picking the graphics mode was a matter of trading off between having memory for code and memory for output. I remember all this from when I wrote (what I now know to be) my first IDE. For the BBC. The trick was I loaded pieces of the program off floppy disk when needed. (I still hate those DFS floppies; only having a maximum of 31 files per disk was very limiting. Didn't have the ADFS available.)

And sound. BBC Micro had 3 channels of tones, plus a white noise channel, all ADSR programmable. Speccy had a single bit attached to a speaker.

Planetoid and Elite proved that you could do plenty. Planetoid used the full colour 20kB mode and hardware scrolling. Elite used a mixed medium res monochrome mode and low res 4 colour mode. Presumably using 10kB.

For an IDE where you had floppy available, presumably you used teletext graphics (1kB) for the coding, and saved the source code to disk before running so the object code could use any graphics mode it needed.

This was the power of the BBC Micro graphics. A choice of low memory teletext mode and sev

Sorry to predate all of you, but I started with an RCA VIP - no BASIC, 2K of RAM, hex keypad and 64x32 (pixel, not character) video. Later I did get a T/S 2068 (the US version of the Spectrum, with some additional sound hardware).

I've still got two Spectrum +2's, a +3, a Spectrum+ 48K (well, two of those, actually - one with the rubber keys and one with a custom clicky board), a BBC Model A, Commodore 16K+, portable 8080 (a pre-x86 x86 with a SIX WEEK BATTERY LIFE!! Modern netbooks top off at ten hours, what's up with that!?), and a Casio FX 82S that I bought in 1990 for my high school exams. They all still work as well. One of these days I''m gonna hook 'em up and open a live museum in my garage.

C64 hardware was good at character-map based, scrolling graphics but if you needed more than eight sprites on horizontal line you had problems.

The Spectrum was bitmapped graphics, it was bad at scrolling but you could have more sprites and do more 3D stuff, eg. there were quite a few fully-interactive isometric-view games and even some filled-3D-polygon games (Starstrike) which the C64 was really bad at.

Sound was produced by the Z80 CPU on the Spectrum. That meant that you could not have a soundtrack in games because the processor would have to dedicate 100% of a given cycle to playing a sound. You could have a beep or two as soundeffects, but no soundtrack to speak of, unless the game was either very basic, or the programmer was very, very talented.
For the life of me, I cannot think of another soundtrack except Manic Miner.
Also, I had a ZX. Games on the C64 were much, much better looking than on the Spectrum. there was no comparison. The Spectrum had a near-fatal flow: you could not have a 8x8 square with more than two colours. So that meant that most games were two-coloured affairs - one colour for the background, another for the sprite, and even then you could have the colour clashing that made Spectrum gaming unique. Whatever the Spectrum's faults, this in my opinion was the biggest by far and since it was a hardware limitation, it meant that games simply could never be as nice looking as the competition.

BBC Micro owners weren't jealous of anyone. They had it all. Pixel addressable colour graphics, good at scrolling, better than the speccy at isometric (because of lack of attribute clashes). Programmable sound chip.

I always thought a lot of C64 games, though colourful had really blocky looking graphics. The Spectrum seemed to have better detail, but with the drawback it was mostly in monochrome.

In the Spectrum's later years programmers came up with a few clever tricks to get the appearance of full colour graphics. If I recall, Uridium's title screen had a full colour title? JetSet Willy and Gilligans Gold are two games with a soundtrack - can't think of anymore though!

There's been some other projects on the Spectrum colour pallette, for instance the ULA Plus enhancement, which replaces the flash and bright attributes and uses a colour lookup table. It's very easy to modify existing software to ma

The limitations on the hardware sprites were why many C-64 games used software sprites for "characters", reserving the hardware sprites for "bullets" in most cases, and relying entirely on software to do the collision detection.

So although the C-64 had more "advanced" sprite hardware, in practice it wasn't used by anything but the simplest and most basic of arcade shooter games.

Hell, you couldn't even program Space Invaders using the hardware sprites, and that's about as basic as a game could get!

Meanwhile, in those intervening 13 years between you tinkering with a machine and actually becoming enthusiastic with programming, the rest of us loved it and used it and learned to program on it and it lead us onto other platforms.

For instance, if you totally missed the Spectrum+ with it's hard keyboard, or the +2/+3 with a "real" keyboard, then you missed out on a great machine.

And the point of the "T9-typing", as you put it, was to reduce the amount of time you had to spend actually typing on that keyboa